Many music students who study privately but never go to music school or take academic music courses learn very little harmony or theory. As a result, these students are lacking in the intellectual framework on which piano and other musical pieces are built. This can seriously compromise confidence and enjoyment in playing. Further, students who do go to music school tend to regard the learning of theory and harmony too much as a task and too little as a pleasure, and thus tend not to feel especially motivated to pass on their learning to others, whether in a professional sense or among their own family and friends. The realms of theory and harmony, and thus, to a certain degree, the realm of music itself, remain esoteric and for an elite few to intellectually comprehend.
The reasons for this limitation are varied, having partly to do with the place and view of art in our culture. Part of the reason, however, has to do with the dry, uncreative, and often intimidating way in which music theory and harmony are taught. Specifically, traditional methods of teaching harmony and theory rely on perceptions of logic and analytical thought (comprising names of notes, written musical theory, rhythmic notation, sequence of scales, structural details of the piece, etc.) rather than employing a combination of this type of thought and its complement: kinesthetic and spatial experience of the notes. The more the musical learning integrates these two kinds of thought (referred to also as left brain and right brain capacities), the quicker the learning takes place and the longer it is retained.
The present invention grew out of a desire to create a new approach to the study of musical theory and harmony for beginning students, students with some technique but no intellectual background, and students who are more advanced but whose training has relied on only part of their brain's learning faculties for music--in other words, a desire and need were felt for an approach that would be nonintimidating as well as more effective and more enjoyable than the traditional approach, and that could either be self-taught or learned through a combination of self-teaching and interacting with a teacher. The result is an accessible and inexpensive method of learning theory and harmony which can be enjoyed by keyboard and nonkeyboard music students alike, whether they are in elementary school or no longer in school, and whether they attend music school or have neither the time nor the money to do so.